


Purls of Wisdom

by marinarusalka



Category: Hilda the Plus-Size Pin-up Series - Duane Bryers
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Humor, Knitting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27951668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marinarusalka/pseuds/marinarusalka
Summary: Hilda's new knitting project hits an unexpected snag.
Comments: 29
Kudos: 37
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Purls of Wisdom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BardicRaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BardicRaven/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, BardicRaven! I was absolutely charmed to see Hilda on your list of requests. Even though it wasn't the fandom we matched on, I just had to write it. And since you also list knitting as a fandom, I tried to work that in also. I hope you enjoy.

Hilda loved autumn. Every October, when the air turned crisp and the trees around her cozy little cottage started to deck themselves out in shades of red and orange and gold, she declared that fall was her absolute favorite season. (This opinion changed with every clear, snow-plush December, and every breezy, flower-scented April, and every lush, green June, but Hilda didn’t consider that a contradiction. Her favorite place in the world was her cottage, and her favorite time was always the time she was in.)

“Pumpkin,” she announced one morning as she opened the kitchen window and basked in the first hint of chill in the air, “this is my absolute favorite season.”

Pumpkin took this as an invitation to come over and be petted, because he took everything as an invitation to come over and be petted.

After having her breakfast and playing fetch with Pumpkin for a while, Hilda went to the linen cupboard to retrieve her Autumn Blanket. It was a gorgeous expanse of the softest wool, worked in an intricate wavy pattern of the same colors as the changing leaves outside. Hilda’s grandmother had made it, and it was just the perfect thing for cozying up in a rocking chair on the porch on a cool day, with a cup of hot cocoa and a good book. 

But as she opened the box she’d stored the blanket in last year and unwrapped the tissue paper inside, Hilda could see that something _terrible_ had happened.

“Oh, no, Pumpkin!”

Despite the cedar shavings Hilda had put inside the box, despite the little sachet of thyme and lavender, The moths had found her Autumn Blanket. A whole powdery-winged cloud of them fluttered out when Hilda unfolded the last sheet of tissue paper. As she lifted the blanket, she could see the many irregular holes marring the pattern, and the frayed edges where her grandmother’s perfectly even stitches had started to unravel. It was clear that even with the most careful mending, the blanket would never look the same again.

“It’s ruined!”

The rest of the morning (after a few minutes set aside for a proper, cathartic crying jag) was spent clearing out the linen cupboard, checking the rest of the contents for damage (happily minimal) and thoroughly cleaning every inch of the cupboard’s insides. Afterwards, fortified by a bowl of vegetable soup, a grilled cheese sandwich and a fair amount of chocolate, Hilda was able to face facts.

_I’m going to need a new Autumn Blanket._

Her trusty Sears catalog had a number of blankets on offer, but none of them were exactly what Hilda wanted. She had a clear picture in mind – a pattern not quite the same as Gran’s but similar, with the same colors and maybe a nice crochet border to make it extra fancy. It had to be big, too, wide enough to properly wrap herself up in, but not too thick and definitely not scratchy. Hilda could tell, just from looking at the photos, that some of the blankets in the catalog were going to be scratchy. (She had an instinct for these things, just as she had an instinct for knowing which chairs would be most comfortable to sit on, which towels would be fluffiest, and which rugs would feel nicest on bare feet. A lifetime of mail-order shopping had trained her well.) 

“I think,” Hilda said to Miss Kitty, “I shall have to knit this blanket myself.”

“Meow,” said Miss Kitty, and batted a dust mote with her paw.

Hilda knew how to knit. She’d made potholders, and scarves, and one sock that still sat in her nightstand drawer a year later, waiting for its mate. She’d never made a colorwork blanket, but she was sure she could do it. A blanket was just a very large potholder, wasn’t it? And colorwork was just switching from one ball of yarn to another. Hilda was good at figuring things out. She had fixed her own plumbing, grown her own vegetables, caught her own fish, and once, after another Sears catalog disappointment, made herself a very stylish two-piece swimsuit out of an old flour sack. She could make her own blanket.

The first step, of course, was to unravel the old one. This took a great deal longer than Hilda was expecting, even though the moths had started the work for her. The yarn kept getting snagged every few yards as she pulled at it, and Hilda had to carefully work the strands apart with her fingernails each time. And then there were the moth holes – whenever she reached one with her unraveling, she had to stop and join the separate ends of yarn together. Hilda’s Gran had known how to fuse the ends into an invisible join, but Hilda had never learned the trick herself, so she just made the knots as small as she could and hoped for the best. 

By dinner time, the blanket was about half undone, with each color yarn (five all together) wound into large, slightly lopsided balls.

“I think that’s enough for the day,” Hilda said. Her fingers were starting to ache, and her eyes were tired from squinting at tiny stitches all day. She rewarded herself with a nice big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and a glass of wine, then spent the evening sketching designs for her new blanket in a little notebook. She didn’t have any graph paper, but she did her best to estimate how many stitches should go into each colorwork bit, and to write the numbers down in the margins. It was quite a challenge to work the whole thing out, and Hilda went to bed with a well-earned sense of accomplishment.

*****

Hilda flailed awake in the middle of the night. It took a minute of confused blinking into the dark before she figured out what had jolted her from her sleep – a series of thumping, thudding noises coming from next door, punctuated by hisses and the occasional tiny, terrified squeak.

“Pumpkin? Miss Kitty? What are you two up to out there?” Hilda fished her bunny slippers from under the bed, threw on a robe over her nightgown, and padded out into the parlor to see what the commotion was about. “Miss Kitty, did you find another mouse?” She flicked on the light and froze, aghast, at the disaster unfolding before her.

The remains of her Gran’s blanket, along with all the yarn she’d been so carefully winding, were now scattered all over the floor in a shaggy, hopelessly tangled mess. In the middle of it, with her tail straight up and her fur all spiky, was Miss Kitty. As Hilda watched, the cat hissed again and batted one paw at a small lump under one corner of the blanket. The lump squeaked.

 _Oh no, it really is a mouse!_ Hilda froze, torn between the impulse to run screaming from the room and the knowledge that she really should get the poor thing away from Miss Kitty. As she stood there, the lump squeaked again, and she realized that its squeals were actually words.

“Help me!” the lump that was clearly not a mouse called out in a high, piping voice. “Please somebody help me!”

For another moment or two, Hilda stayed frozen in stupefied disbelief. Then she rushed forward, scooped Miss Kitty into her arms, tossed her into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. With the mighty huntress thus safely contained, Hilda edged forward toward the lump, which had stopped squealing, and was now shivering violently under its blanket cover. Had she imagined those calls for help?

 _Please don’t be a mouse, please don’t be a mouse, please don’t be a mouse…_ Hilda yanked the blanket from the floor, and leaped backwards with all the speed she could muster.

It wasn’t a mouse. It was a tiny woman, naked and plump, no bigger than a hummingbird. She was curled up on her side, with her arms wrapped around her knees and her eyes squeezed shut. And fanned out from her back, partially hidden by waves of long, silvery hair, was a pair of gorgeous iridescent butterfly wings.

“Holy sh-- moley!” said Hilda.

The woman – fairy, Hilda was quite sure it was a fairy – didn’t seem hurt, only frightened. She looked so fragile that Hilda was afraid to touch her, but she didn’t want to leave the poor thing just lying on the cold floor either. Maybe if she had something to wrap up in…

Hilda made a quick dash for the bedroom. Miss Kitty was on the bed, looking disgruntled. Hilda shook one finger at her.

“Bad kitty!” she scolded, but her heart wasn’t in it. Miss Kitty was just following her instincts, after all, and Hilda knew it was partly her fault for leaving all that tempting yarn out in the open. And the fairy woman with her sparkly wings must’ve been irresistible. They were all just lucky that Pumpkin had been too sleepy to join the hunt.

Hilda took a linen handkerchief from her dresser and went back into the parlor. The fairy woman was still there, and still shivering on the floor. Hilda crouched down and gently draped the handkerchief over her.

“There, there,” she said. “It’s okay now. You’re safe. I promise I won’t let the kitty get you.”

The fairy woman made no response. Hilda stood up and hesitated, wondering what other comfort she could possibly offer.

 _Chocolate!_ she decided. After all, it always helped her when she was stressed or upset. 

Hilda ran to the kitchen and fetched her emergency stash of almond truffles from the box at the back of the pantry. Each truffle was as big as the fairy woman’s head, so Hilda cut one into quarters, popped three of the pieces into her own mouth (after all, she was pretty upset too, wasn’t she?) and carried the fourth back to the parlor.

“Would you like some--” she began, and then broke off, because the fairy woman was gone. Hilda’s handkerchief lay folded into a tiny, perfect square on the little table next to the stove, but the only living thing in the room apart from Hilda herself was Pumpkin, who was curled up in his doggy bed, wearing the smug impression of a pup who was, for once in his life, completely secure in the knowledge of his own innocence.

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” Hilda told him. “You really should’ve stopped Miss Kitty, you know?”

Pumpkin gave her an offended look and licked his own nose.

Well, Hilda decided, if the fairy woman managed to leave under her own power (and to fold a handkerchief so nearly before she went), then she probably wasn’t injured very badly. That was a relief. Hilda sighed, popped the last little bite of chocolate into her mouth, and went to gather up her yarn and ruined blanket from the floor. A few minutes’ worth of examination confirmed what she had feared – there was no fixing this mess. She’d never undo all those tangles, and most of the knitted part was now shredded. With a heavy heart, Hilda dumped the entire armful of wool into the waste basket and returned to bed.

But sleep wouldn’t come. Hilda tossed and turned for what felt like hours, but she couldn’t silence the questions buzzing in her mind like a swarm of very confused bees. Was that tiny woman in the parlor really a fairy? Where did she come from? Were there others around, and why hadn’t Hilda seen them before? And was a fairy infestation a good thing or a bad thing? Hilda’s childhood reading did not provide a clear answer to that question. Upon reflection, she decided that putting a saucer of milk out on the porch might not be a bad idea.

Reluctantly (because the night was a chilly one), Hilda climbed out of bed again and headed for the kitchen. But when she stepped into the parlor, she stopped short.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice.

There were now not one, but _four_ tiny, naked, winged women in the room, two of them on top of the table and two hovering just above them. Together, they were manipulating Hilda’s knitting needles with amazing speed and skill. The fact that each needle was several times their length didn’t seem to hamper them in the slightest. They were knitting up the yarn from Gran’s blanket, which was now wound into five perfectly smooth, perfectly round balls. They were making good progress, too – from where she stood, Hilda could see that they’d knitted at least two feet of blanket, in a pattern that perfectly matched what she’d sketched in her notebook.

“Oh,” Hilda said again.

The fairies let out a chorus of little squeaks and dropped the needles. Hilda took a quick step backwards.

“So sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. But… what are you doing?”

The fairies conferred with each other in whispers too faint for Hilda to hear. Then one of them – Hilda was sure it was the one Miss Kitty had pounced on earlier – stepped forward.

“Kind lady,” she said, “my sisters and I wished to thank you for saving me from the terrible many-clawed monster.”

Hilda wanted to protest that Miss Kitty was not at all a terrible monster, but then she remembered the Great Mouse in Slipper Incident of the previous spring, and decided to let it go.

“You don’t need to thank me,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”

The fairy woman made a little curtsy and clasped her hands in front of her. “Nevertheless,” she said, “you’ve done me a great boon, and I ask that you allow us to do you a small kindness in return.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” Hilda said. She stepped forward to get a closer look at the fairies’ work. It was beautiful, the stitches even more perfectly even than Gran’s, and when she touched the knitted fabric it somehow felt even softer than it ever had before. “You’re amazing knitters, and it’s lovely of you to want to do this for me but…” She trailed off, unsure how to continue without being rude.

“But?” The fairy woman prompted.

Hilda took a deep breath. “I wanted to do it myself,” she said. “I like doing things for myself, you see. Especially when it’s something difficult. It… it just makes me happy, you know?”

“I understand,” the fairy woman said. She turned to whisper with her sisters for a few more moments, then faced Hilda again. “We do wish to make you happy,” she said, and rose into the air with a sparkling flutter of wings. 

The fairies moved so fast now that the air above the table turned into a glittery blur. When they stopped a minute later, all their knitting had been unraveled, and the yarn neatly rewound.

“Enjoy, kind lady!” They chorused, then flew a quick circle around the room and vanished.

“Well!” said Hilda. “That was very odd, wasn’t it?”

“Rrruff!” said Pumpkin.

* * * * *

Hilda did leave a saucer of milk on the porch that night, and every night thereafter. It was always empty in the morning. And when she sat down to knit – not just her blanket, but every project she ever tackled from then on – she found that her yarn never tangled, her stitches were always perfect, her gauge was always exactly right, and her long-tail cast-on always had just the right amount of tail.


End file.
